Ted Mittelstaedt,
Portland, OR.

I was born in 1966 and by age 13 I knew how to solder and by age 15 I was building electronic devices from schematics. By age 20 I had taken apart and put back together several different kinds of computers and written code in assembly language. I also have a complete garage and can disassemble and reassemble a car engine if need be. Today my job is the care and feeding of computer networks, I’m the guy who’s work behind the scenes allows you to even have this website.

You folks need to understand that modern high technology could not function today without the millions of words of technical data created by technicians and posted on technical forums and used by technicians. This is not the idle musings of the Facebook crowd this is the down and dirty of machine code and how it works and how hardware works. This is how techs are able to repair critical technical gear that the manufacturer may have gone into bankruptcy 10 years ago yet the gear is still in service. It is how the operating system this website runs on was written and the software that makes up the webserver was written.

And these techs are scattered all over the world, both genders, and every “race” imaginable.

High Technology is just like Low Technology, it is a tool for humans to do things. The iPhone is the same as an automobile, or a flyswatter, or a hammer or a saucepan. They are all tools. Using tools is what Humans do. And every human in the world, no matter what race, no matter whether they are a dark skinned aborigine in the Australian Outback using a stick, or a white skinned plastic surgeon in Cleveland driving a BMW, is using a tool.

My business is keeping those tools running, and fixing them when they break. And that is the business of every tech in the world. Do you really think for one second that any of us care about the race or gender or any of that nonsense of another tech who helps us do this?

When discussing things like police traffic stops of minorities people forget that those cops are dependent on the technology of their cars that was mostly made by yellow-skinned people in China. The cops who think they are “making the streets safer by scaring off those minority gangs” couldn’t do that without their tech which was created by those same minorities.

The very bullets that were used to kill minorities in some of the recent high profile crimes were made in a factory staffed with minorities.

When discussing things like population demographics in the US changing to minorities becoming the majority, people conveniently ignore that there are so many more people today, that we are now utterly dependent on high tech advanced agriculture to grow enough food to feed everybody. If your definition of “taking back America” is making America like it was 50 years ago – mostly white – then I hope you enjoy starving because if we really went back to doing things in America the way we did them 50 years ago then we wouldn’t grow enough food for the population and everyone would starve.

The reality is that this race discussion is pointless. Race only matters today to people with the luxury to pretend the world is 1000 times simpler than it really is and who have no real clue about how things really work in the world. And as proof of that this very website – which wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for the combined contributions of every race and gender working together for years – has the hubris to setup a “discussion” as though there was any choice in the matter.

Only a liberal arts graduate who probably doesn’t even know how to do her own oil changes could think up something like this site.